It is with great sadness that we share the news that our colleague, Pepi Leistyna, passed away earlier this year. Pepi was a Professor of Applied Linguistics at the University of Massachusetts at Boston where he taught classes on critical pedagogy, cultural studies, and media literacy and directed the Center for World Languages and Cultures. He was an elected member of the WCSA’s steering committee and served on the program committee for the 2010 How Class Works conference. His contributions to the field include the documentary, Class Dismissed: How TV Frames the Working Class, which won the Studs Terkel Award for Media and Journalism in 2007, and several ground-breaking publications: Breaking Free: The Transformative Power of Critical Pedagogy, The Presence of Mind: Education and the Politics of Deception, Defining and Designing Multiculturalism, Cultural Studies: From Theory to Action, and his most recent book, Television and Working Class Identity: Intersecting Differences. He served on the editorial boards of Radical Teacher, Public Resistance, the Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies as well as several others and won the 2013 Peace Maker Award for his work on the Whole9 Peace Project.
For additional information about Pepi’s commitment to social justice and activism, see the tributes published by Radical Teacher and the National Education Policy Center.